The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies

[Coriolan]

They finally tested the genomes of the Tarim mummies and the results are surprising.

Here's the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04052-7

[Duarte]

Bronze Age Tarim mummies aren't who scientists thought they were:
https://www.livescience.com/tarim-mummies-origins-uncovered

https://static-content.springer.com/...OESM4_ESM.xlsx

[kingjohn]

Originally Posted by Megalophias
( anthrogenica)
The Tarim Basin samples (~1600-1900 BC) had 2 R1b2-pre-PH155 and 1 R1(xR1a, R1b-L754), which is probably the same thing.
The Dzhungarian ones (2800-3000 BC) had 2 Q2a-F1213 and 1 R1b1-Z2103.
The R1b1-Z2103 is presumably from Afanasievo, the R1b2-PH155 from ANE/West Siberian/Central Asian people native to the Tarim Basin or nearby areas.

P.s
No surprise remains belong to r1b and Q1b1
And i see also 1 individual R1(× r1b, r1a)

[Duarte]

Originally Posted by Megalophias

( anthrogenica)
The Tarim Basin samples (~1600-1900 BC) had 2 R1b2-pre-PH155 and 1 R1(xR1a, R1b-L754), which is probably the same thing.
The Dzhungarian ones (2800-3000 BC) had 2 Q2a-F1213 and 1 R1b1-Z2103.
The R1b1-Z2103 is presumably from Afanasievo, the R1b2-PH155 from ANE/West Siberian/Central Asian people native to the Tarim Basin or nearby areas.
P.s
No surprise remains belong to r1b and Q1b1
And i see also 1 individual R1(× r1b, r1a)

”…. Since the late 1990s, the discovery of hundreds of naturally mummified human remains dating to around 2000 BC to AD 200 in the Tarim Basin has attracted international attention due to their so-called Western physical appearance …We find that the Early–Middle Bronze Age Tarim individuals contain only a local ancestry…Considering these findings together, the genetic profile of the Tarim Basin individuals indicates that the earliest individuals of the Xiaohe horizon belong to an ancient and isolated autochthonous Asian gene pool. This autochthonous ANE-related gene pool is likely to have formed the genetic substratum of the pre-pastoralist ANE-related populations of Central Asia and southern Siberia…The Tarim mummies’ so-called Western physical features are probably due to their connection to the Pleistocene ANE gene pool, and their extreme genetic isolation differs from the EBA Dzungarian…the Tarim mummies represent a culturally cosmopolitan but genetically isolated autochthonous population…the palaeogenomic characterization of the Tarim mummies has unexpectedly revealed one of the few known Holocene-era genetic descendant populations of the once widespread Pleistocene ANE ancestry profile…The Tarim mummy genomes thus provide a critical reference point for genetically modelling Holocene-era populations and reconstructing the population history of Asia…”

[johen]

Originally Posted by Megalophias
( anthrogenica)
The Tarim Basin samples (~1600-1900 BC) had 2 R1b2-pre-PH155 and 1 R1(xR1a, R1b-L754), which is probably the same thing.
The Dzhungarian ones (2800-3000 BC) had 2 Q2a-F1213 and 1 R1b1-Z2103.
The R1b1-Z2103 is presumably from Afanasievo, the R1b2-PH155 from ANE/West Siberian/Central Asian people native to the Tarim Basin or nearby areas.
P.s
No surprise remains belong to r1b and Q1b1
And i see also 1 individual R1(× r1b, r1a)

Tianshan Hun at Iron age would be their descendent.
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...-tocharian-DNA (post 1 and 24)

[Cato]

So ANE people had light hair? The dark hair of the Yamnaya are due to CHG admixture i guess

[traveller]

So ANE people had light hair?

The ANE sample used in the study (AG3) is also the oldest sample where the hair-lightening KITLG gene mutation was spotted.

[traveller]

Is this the first example of a population that was genetically isolated for a long time while still interacting with neighbours?

[Maciamo]

I have been waiting for this for over 10 years! I haven't had time to read the paper yet, but here are the haplogroups of the mummies tested.




According to the supplementary data, G218M5-2 5Dzungaria EBA) is R1b-Z2103, so clearly Yamna-related.

Q1b1 originated in Central Asia and was assimilated by Indo-European migrants during the Bronze Age. That is what we can see here. The mtDNA in Dzungaria is all European and typical of the Pontic Steppe.

In contrast, all the mtDNA in the Tarim basin is C4, which is usually West Siberian, but has been found in Eastern Europe (Volga-Ural, Pontci-Caspian Steppe) at least since the Bronze Age.

The Y-DNA from the Tarim basin is R1b-PH155, which is indicated as R1b2-M335 on my R1b phylogeny. Nowadays it is found in Turkey, Albania, Italy, Kyrgyzstan and various provinces of China (Jilin, Shandong, Hebei). The Chinese branches appear to descend from the Anatolian ones, but it cannot be excluded that those found in Turkey today came from Central Asia with the original Turkish tribes. Based on the very low diversity of mtDNA and Y-DNA, the Tarim basin population probably experienced a serious bottleneck, or was just a tiny founding population.

[Cato]

The ANE sample used in the study (AG3) is also the oldest sample where the hair-lightening KITLG gene mutation was spotted.

True, IIRC is the same individual (female) of the study by Mathieson et al. . I haven't read the study yet

[Maciamo]

Back in 2011, when PH155 was not yet discovered, I postulated that the Tarim mummies would belong to a branch of R1b that split early from the Proto-Indo-European core. My reasoning was that they were probably Proto-Tocharians and as that branch split very early from other Indo-European languages, their Y-DNA would mirror that early split. I proposed R1b-M73. Here we find the older PH155, which descends from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers from the Eurasian Steppe, but also R1b-Z2103, which could be the Proto-Tocharian branch in this context.

[Angela]

So ANE people had light hair? The dark hair of the Yamnaya are due to CHG admixture i guess

The only way to know whether the appearance of the mummies is down to the mummification process or to genes is if the mummies were tested for the major snps responsible for lighter pigmentation. (One gene in isolation isn't going to lighten hair.) In addition, they'd have to test the hair itself to see what changes, if any, occurred post mortem. According to a Lazaridis tweet, if I'm understanding it correctly, apparently they passed on that opportunity.

"This is a very interesting study! It would have been nice if phenotypic information on the studied individuals and predicted phenotypes were available, to see the correspondence -if any- with the mummies popularized in the West by V. Mair and others."

[Angela]

"We find that the Early Bronze Age Dzungarian individuals exhibit a predominantly Afanasievo ancestry with an additional local contribution, and the Early–Middle Bronze Age Tarim individuals contain only a local ancestry. The Tarim individuals from the site of Xiaohe further exhibit strong evidence of milk proteins in their dental calculus, indicating a reliance on dairy pastoralism at the site since its founding. Our results do not support previous hypotheses for the origin of the Tarim mummies, who were argued to be Proto-Tocharian-speaking pastoralists descended from the Afanasievo 1,2 or to have originated among the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex 3 or Inner Asian Mountain Corridor cultures 4. Instead, although Tocharian may have been plausibly introduced to the Dzungarian Basin by Afanasievo migrants during the Early Bronze Age, we find that the earliest Tarim Basin cultures appear to have arisen from a genetically isolated local population that adopted neighbouring pastoralist and agriculturalist practices, which allowed them to settle and thrive along the shifting riverine oases of the Taklamakan Desert."

Well, that would make their cultural artifacts the result of cultural exchange, but not demographic movement.

[johen]

Tianshan Hun at Iron age would be their descendent.
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...-tocharian-DNA (post 1 and 24)

The problem of the Tian Hun is not only yDNA but also 80% steppe admixture.
As I remembered, the possibility was mentioned that EHG-like WSHG and CHG could make the steppe admixture. Scholars tried to connect the steppe admixture at bronze age to south asian’s admixture in India where WSHG and CHG already migrated before bronze age.

Moreover, outlier WSHG Z2103 was found in Sintashta which was surrounded by seima turbino. The ST culture was developed from P297 bol'shemysskaya culture which predated Afansievo. The ST was connected to Chemurckek at Tarim basin. The ST and karasuk continually migrated china where tons of PIE were found.

Thus Tocharian language speaker would have admixture of WSHG and CHG. In other words, ancient people with WSHG and CHG would speak PIE.

If scholar tried to connect Afansievo culture to the tarim basin, anthro and archaeology evidences should be required.
http://secher.bernard.free.fr/blog/p..._Tableau14.jpg

see alsoadmixture model. Actually steppe_MLBA_EAST = steppe_MLBA_west + 9% WSHG, however, only EHG increased

[Angela]

I never understood how people with so much East Eurasian ancestry were supposed to look so Western European. To my eyes their faces actually looked more East Asian than anything else, given their cheekbones and eyes, and even the noses looked pretty flat to me. It sometimes seemed to me that the only reason for thinking them western looking was the hair, and I was never convinced that was the result of genes rather than the process of mummification.

Maybe I'm wrong though. Anyway, I found the phenotypic information in page J of Supplementary Table I. They don't seem particularly high in derived alleles for de-pigmentation, but maybe I'm reading it incorrectly.

[kingjohn]

To me personally
It is strange there is no r1a
Among the tarim basin remains
We are speaking at bronze age here
r1a was sure in the arena

[ThirdTerm]

I never understood how people with so much East Eurasian ancestry were supposed to look so Western European. To my eyes their faces actually looked more East Asian than anything else, given their cheekbones and eyes, and even the noses looked pretty flat to me.

These Tarim girls from the World Bank website on water resource management are probably their modern-day descendants, from whom we can imagine how ANE people would have originally looked like. R1b-PH155 is found in modern Tarim males, while 12 Tarim Basin individuals from the study belong to mitochondrial haplogroup C4, which was also found in an Upper Palaeolithic Ust-Kyakhta individual.



Restoring China's Tarim River Basin

Better management of water resources led to higher crop yields, diversification into higher-value crops and increased social status and employment opportunities for many women.

[johen]

"The Tarim Basin individuals as a mixture of two ancient autochthonous Asian genetic groups: the ANE, represented by an Upper Palaeolithic individual from the Afontova Gora site in the upper Yenisei River region of Siberia (AG3) (about 72%), and ancient Northeast Asians, represented by Baikal_EBA (about 28%)"

It seems to me that the tarim persons have west 50: east 50 admixture.(right?) As always, ancient 50:50 person makes modern people confused. Chandman people at Mongolia iron age clustered with cromagnon and american indian barefoot. Its skull looks like modern polynesian and Jomon. Chandman has 50:50, whose direct descendent is west xoungnu people:

Xoungnu:
t all.




another 50:50 seima turbino:


And the tarim basin people had probably big nose:

1. Xiaohe : caucasoid mask from lop nur (tarim basin)
e

[bicicleur 2]

These Tarim girls from the World Bank website on water resource management are probably their modern-day descendants, from whom we can imagine how ANE people would have originally looked like. R1b-PH155 is found in modern Tarim males, while 12 Tarim Basin individuals from the study belong to mitochondrial haplogroup C4, which was also found in an Upper Palaeolithic Ust-Kyakhta individual.



Restoring China's Tarim River Basin

Better management of water resources led to higher crop yields, diversification into higher-value crops and increased social status and employment opportunities for many women.

this is how tocharians looked liked prior to the invasion of the Uyghurs

Attachment 12986



this is how the invading Uyghurs looked like

[Angela]

These Tarim girls from the World Bank website on water resource management are probably their modern-day descendants, from whom we can imagine how ANE people would have originally looked like. R1b-PH155 is found in modern Tarim males, while 12 Tarim Basin individuals from the study belong to mitochondrial haplogroup C4, which was also found in an Upper Palaeolithic Ust-Kyakhta individual.



Restoring China's Tarim River Basin

Better management of water resources led to higher crop yields, diversification into higher-value crops and increased social status and employment opportunities for many women.

Yes, they definitely look like a mix of east and west; never would anyone mistake them for Western Europeans, imo, although maybe a few might pass as Russians. More than a few have an American Indian look to them. Well, that would make sense given what we know of the latter's ethnogenesis.

The Dzungarians are a different story. Clearly, Afanasievo people moved into the area, and over time and space mixed a bit with the local Tarim Basin type, before there was an even larger migration from the east.

[Anfänger]

Razib Khans opinion about the Tarim mummies:

The Tarim Mummies Were The Last Of The Paleo-Siberians

The paper that reported on the data from the famous “Tarim Mummies” is out. If you don’t have a good grasp of the alphabet soup of ancient early Holocene populations, the results are going to be hard to parse. So I’ll make it simple for you: it now looks that the Tarim populations from 4,000 years ago are among the last people who were mostly “Ancestral North Eurasian” (ANE), and, they had no connection to populations in Europe. The second part is important because Victor Mair and others who have examined the mummies are wont to proclaim that the “Loulan Beauty” and her peers were “Caucasoid” due to their physical features. This may still be technically true, but the inference that this has to do with migration from the west of a European-origin population turns out to be false.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021/...leo-siberians/

[Angela]

The Tarim Basin people are certainly not the Tocharians imo, going by the phenotypic list of the former's attributes, and I also have some doubts the Tocharians had anything to do with the Dzungarians.

We may have to look elsewhere for the Tocharians, and to a more recent time period, imo, as Dienekes always maintained, and which I always found plausible, although he was wrong in attributing the genetics of the Tarim Basin mummies to Iranian people from the west. These people were an ancient relict population, and nothing to do with movements from the steppe.

Ancient genetics has put a kaput to another trope of population genetics, or at least of "populist" population genetics.

Another thing seems highly probably to me: "R" y dna has its ultimate source in ancient Siberia.

[Doggerland]

Lets hear what the data has to say about the hair color of the Tarim Mummies:

rs12821256 CC = Blonde/Lighter hair is present in Individual ERR6454742 L5209. This is the blonde allele that was also present in Ukraine Mesolithic. There is a study that claims that Afontova Gora 3 contains it too, but I cannot proof this, because the data on ENA is of low quality and does not contain the specific SNP.

They appear genetically isolated, because they have low amount of heterozygosity.

How they looked:

They had broad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
The nose bridge was hooked, the nose was slim and the nostrils too. They had a large mouth with thin lips and a wide philtrum.


The eye color was brown to hazel, not blue.
The skin color was brown.

The hair was wavy and dark blonde or red, because one individual had the red alleles of rs1805006

[Anfänger]

Lets hear what the data has to say about the hair color of the Tarim Mummies:

rs12821256 CC = Blonde/Lighter hair is present in Individual ERR6454742 L5209. This is the blonde allele that was also present in Ukraine Mesolithic. There is a study that claims that Afontova Gora 3 contains it too, but I cannot proof this, because the data on ENA is of low quality and does not contain the specific SNP.

They appear genetically isolated, because they have low amount of heterozygosity.

How they looked:

They had broad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
The nose bridge was hooked, the nose was slim and the nostrils too. They had a large mouth with thin lips and a wide philtrum.


The eye color was brown to hazel, not blue.
The skin color was brown.

The hair was wavy and dark blonde or red, because one individual had the red alleles of rs1805006

So some of the mummies probably had light hair(red and/or dark blonde) but brown eyes. How come other populations rich in ANE-ancestry turn out to be dark haired ? I think of EHG, CHG and Iran_N.

[Angela]

Lets hear what the data has to say about the hair color of the Tarim Mummies:

rs12821256 CC = Blonde/Lighter hair is present in Individual ERR6454742 L5209. This is the blonde allele that was also present in Ukraine Mesolithic. There is a study that claims that Afontova Gora 3 contains it too, but I cannot proof this, because the data on ENA is of low quality and does not contain the specific SNP.

They appear genetically isolated, because they have low amount of heterozygosity.

How they looked:

They had broad faces, the lower part of the face appeared longer, because the mouth sat deeper. The forehead was flat, the eye sockets where wide. No visible/reduced eyelids, this trait is also found in SHG. The information for the EDAR gene(Asian Hair, Teeth) is not present in the samples I have analyzed.
The nose bridge was hooked, the nose was slim and the nostrils too. They had a large mouth with thin lips and a wide philtrum.


The eye color was brown to hazel, not blue.
The skin color was brown.

The hair was wavy and dark blonde or red, because one individual had the red alleles of rs1805006

By all means, let's look at the data in detail.

Perhaps you should take another look at rs1805006, bearing in mind that "cases with reads supporting the presence of derived alleles are marked by grey shades". So far as I can see, it's not so marked.

Also note that while rs1800404 on OCA2 is so marked, rs1800407 is not, and neither is

rs12913832

on HERC2.

As to rs1800404, it appears to be associated with skin lightening in East Asians, and it's present even in West Africans at a rate of 4%.
"

• "rs1800404","15","25909368","TT" - OCA2 355*A, rs1800404 European=58% West African=4%

[PMID 17182896] Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East AsiansMol Biol Evol (2007) 24 (3): 710-722. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msl203http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/3/710.fullhttp://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/conten...expansion.htmlhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/snp_ref.cgi?rs=1800404"


rs1800407, even if it were so marked, which it isn't:
"rs1800407 is located in exon 13 of the OCA2 gene at amino acid position 419, and it is therefore also known as the R419Q variant. The (A) allele encodes the amino acid glutamine (instead of arginine), and it is associated with increased odds of having green/hazel eye color in some Caucasian populations. One copy of of rs1800407(A) is sufficient for this effect. [PMID 12163334, PMID 15889046; OMIM 203200.0012][PMID 18093281] According to tree scanning analysis, the proportion of eye colour variation explained by this nucleotide position is merely 4%. Thus, additional variation present in the OCA2 gene and perhaps some other pigment related genes must be taken into account in order to explain the high phenotypic variation in iris colour."

So, to claim these people possibly had hazel eyes wouldn't seem to be warranted according to the authors.

One sample having a snp associated with light hair is hardly a ringing endorsement for how fair these people were.

As the authors make clear, and I have always stressed, pigmentation is the result of the accumulation and depigmentation effect of many snps. ANE "might" have contributed a snp for lighter hair, which later in the SHG, for example, in combination with light eye and light skin snps could have resulted in the light haired and light eyed phenotype. That's a different story.

I'm not going to get into a further discussion of pigmentation because 1) I'm not that interested, and 2) people get emotional when it is pointed out that their support for such results is tenuous at best.

As to their physical features, they still look Amerindian to me, North American Amerindian, to be precise, with the what, almost 1/3 East Asian perhaps responsible.

The important news is that these people had no steppe in them. They are NOT the Tocharians.